1. Since the start of the pandemic, the president has acted frequently as if a cure for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, were just around the corner.
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12. I’m borrowing from Joan Didion’s Political Fictions. In the introduction, she explains her difficulty comprehending the 1988 election.
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13. JD: “There remained about domestic politics something resistant, recondite, some occult irreconcilability that kept all news of it just below my attention level. The events of the campaign as reported seemed to have taken place in a language I did not recognize.
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14. JD: The stakes of election as presented did not compute. … I could clearly bring no access, no knowledge, no understanding.”
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15. Didion’s chief complaint in her classic analysis is that the campaign press corps invents a vernacular that only those already inside the machinations of Washington can understand,
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16. leaving those outside the circles of power to wonder what it all means, which is detrimental to the American principle of democratic self-determination.
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17. I think “occult” can be adapted for our own times if we think of it as more than belief in “vampires or fairies and movements like ufology and parapsychology,” to quote occultism’s Wikipedia entry.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occult
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18. If we think of the politics of the occult as those things just outside our normal human comprehension, things just behind the reach of our senses and our reason, but also things hostile toward established knowledge,
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19. then virtually everything associated with Trump is more coherent, because it’s clear it’s not supposed to be clear—unless, you’re already on the inside the politics of the occult.
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20. Coronavirus protesters, sovereign citizen militias, Deep State conspiracists, QAnon (the belief that Democrats worship Satan and have orgies with children), and even white evangelical Christian preachers defying stay-at-home orders and turning congregants into idolaters—
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21. —all of these and more can be better described as variations on a theme of the politics of the occult. None of it makes sense, because it was never intended to make sense, and our *forcing it to make sense actually empowers it*.
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22. I don’t intent to besmirch the good names of genuine believers in the occult or the earth-centered religion of magick.
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23. (I’m thinking specifically of the late Margot Adler, an esteemed NPR reporter who was also a Wiccan priestess and wrote a book that established what’s now known as neopaganism.)
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24. But the fact is, occultism has a bad reputation, and I’m not above exploiting it to put Trump’s politics in a rhetorical box.
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25. So the next time a white evangelical preacher says his followers can defend against the new coronavirus by drenching themselves in the blood of Christ, know he’s not practicing the Christian faith so much as practicing the politics of the occult.
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26. Same thing goes for anyone deciding it’s a good idea to inject themselves with bleach.https://stoehr.substack.com/p/light-and-heat-the-politics-of-the …
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27. Thanks for reading! Please consider subscribing to my newsletter, the Editorial Board. https://stoehr.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=web&utm_source=subscribe-widget&utm_content=402442 …
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